On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 07:12:57PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote: > "/*" matched every name in / (not dotfiles) > > The last name matched was /var. We know this because of the list that > Lennart gave us later -- we might have had to figure this out > ourselves. > > Ignoring the clashing names and /var, everything that was in / was > moved to /var. > > Clearly some fundamental tools are impaired. > > The first reason (but not the only one) is that /bin has been moved to > /var/bin (but we may not realize this right away). > > Note: usually echo is built into the shell so > echo * > would work as a substitute for > ls
Yes echo * is very important. > | So what do you do now? > > Take a break to calm down. Anything you do in a panic is likely to > make things worse. Rebooting would have made it a lot harder for sure. Fortunately the guy came and asked me for help instead. > Make a plan. Before you take any step that might be irreversible. > Exploring is OK. > > It's true that this is an interesting problem. But getting tricky > when confronted with an emergency isn't always wise. Well it was only his test system, but it would have been annoying to have to recreate it. > I would probably boot from a live system on a USB stick, mount / > somewhere, and look around. Fixing things from such a system is > actually simpler than trying to do so from the busted system. You > don't need a deep understanding of the mechanisms for run-time > linking. You won't need to get the dynamic linker and libraries back > onstream. I am not actually sure that particular system can even boot from USB, and it has serial console only, no VGA. > A clean shutdown will be a challenge but it probably doesn't matter. > After booting the live system, do an fsck on the original system's / > to make up for a bad shutdown. > > That's really nice to know. In many scenarios you would not know > this. That's for sure. > - this lets you figure out where everything went without any detective > work (/var) > > - this lets you figure out what must be moved back. -- Len Sorensen --- Post to this mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
